General Session at PDC

So I sit here eating my Chinese food for lunch. Barry went to a session. He's a trooper. I'm thinking about the cool things I saw in the general session. I'm new to blogging and I am not going to try and dump everything I saw here in one entry. I'll leave that to the more serious bloggers and writers out there.

However I will tell you a little about the general session.

  • No bathroom breaks
  • 8000 or so people, watching at least 16 giant screens.
  • Check out the pictures. It was pretty cool just from a logistics point of view.

Some demo highlights while I sip the last of my ice tea here:

  1. XAML (pronounced Zamil) is a new buzz word. From what I can gather it's code behind for windows and web. If you have been trying to peg yourself as a windows or web developer stop, it won't matter soon. XAML is an XML language that lets you write your user interface.
  2. Doing cool graphics is easy. Or at least Don Box and Chris Anderson made it look easy.
  3. Very cool demo by Amazon.com. If you get a chance check out the carousel control, Very cool. If anyone knows where you can see a sample of it let me know.
  4. Another cool demo was paging up and down in a document. If you click on the scroll bar a thumbnail appears that shows you where that is in the document. In the demo that particular section of the document had a video playing. It played in the thumbnail too. :)

There was a lot more and a lot more important that these for example the new file system is very exciting. But I have session in a few minutes and I have to find it. I'll try and get on again later today.